Self-Representation and Perspectives in Dreams
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Philosophy Compass 8/11 (2013): 1041–1053, 10.1111/phc3.12082 Self-Representation and Perspectives in Dreams Melanie Rosen and John Sutton* Macquarie University Abstract Integrative and naturalistic philosophy of mind can both learn from and contribute to the contempo- rary cognitive sciences of dreaming. Two related phenomena concerning self-representation in dreams demonstrate the need to bring disparate fields together. In most dreams, the protagonist or dream self who experiences and actively participates in dream events is or represents the dreamer: but in an intriguing minority of cases, self-representation in dreams is displaced, disrupted, or even absent. Working from dream reports in established databanks, we examine two key forms of polymorphism of self-representation: dreams (or dream episodes) in which I take an external visuospatial perspective on myself, and those in which I take someone else’s perspective on events. In remembering my past experiences or imagining future or possible experiences when awake, I sometimes see myself from an external or ‘observer’ perspective. By relating the issue of perspective in dreams to established research traditions in the study of memory and imagery, and noting the flexibility of perspective in dreams, we identify new lines of enquiry. In other dreams, the dreamer does not appear to figure at all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else, some other person or character. We call these puzzling cases ‘vicarious dreams’ and assess some potential ways to make sense of them. Questions about self-representation and perspectives in dreams are intriguing in their own right and pose empirical and conceptual problems about the nature of self-representation with implications beyond the case of dreaming. 1. Introduction What can we learn about the self by considering dreams? Our experiences during sleep, or our more occasional recollections and reports of those experiences, offer us significant insight into the operations of the mind in general. Philosophers continue to worry subtly at the metaphysical and epistemological problems addressed by Descartes’ dream argument (Valberg 2007), and even whether dreams really are experiences during sleep at all (Malcolm 1959; Dennett 1976; Child 2007). But the new sciences of dreaming, in the wake of the discovery of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and of the cognitive revolution, have opened up both entirely new concerns and distinctive twists on older philosophical topics (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 1995; Flanagan 2000; Clark 2005; Windt & Metzinger 2007; Sutton 2009; Windt & Noreika 2011). Theories of consciousness, metacognition, psychophysical reduction, and embodied cognition, to mention just a few examples, can be both informed and constrained by the expanding array of psychological and neurocognitive approaches within dream science (Solms 1997; Foulkes 1999; Hobson, Pace-Schott & Stickgold 2000; Domhoff 2003; Schwartz et al. 2005; Nir & Tononi 2010; Valli 2011). In this paper, we pick out two related, highly specific, and (we think) deeply puzzling dream phenomena which, in addition to their intrinsic interest, also exemplify the possibil- ities for philosophical engagement with the cognitive sciences. These phenomena involve the surprisingly complex ways in which we represent ourselves in dreams and experience dream events from a first-person perspective – although as we’ll see these are not exactly © 2013 The Authors Philosophy Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1042 Perspectives in Dreams equivalent. While these topics clearly connect back to traditional philosophical issues, our methodological angle here is a strongly integrative form of naturalism, in which we seek to put distinct and somewhat disconnected parts of the cognitive sciences into contact. This philosophical strategy involves direct interactive engagement with the relevant sciences, seeking mutual coevolution of theory and evidence, as is standard in philosophy of biology or philosophy of neuroscience (Griffiths & Sterelny, 1999; Craver 2007). In the philosophy of psychology, such work can function as a catalyst, bringing together disparate fields of enquiry within the relevant sciences (compare Sutton 2009, or for the case of emotion, Griffiths 1998 and Colombetti 2013). This catalyst function is increasingly important, because of the daunting (sub-)disciplinary specialization of contemporary sciences. It can be required not only to put into contact research programs across distinctive levels which might be mutually informative, such as cognitive psychology and molecular neuroscience but also across different neurocognitive domains. This latter kind of integration is specifically relevant in the current case, because certain processes of self-representation in dreams may overlap with those involved in some forms of remembering and imagining. Dreaming’s similarities to and differences from perception, imagination, and memory respectively have been the subject of discussion and controversy in both philosophy and science (Foulkes 1999; Sosa 2005; Horton, Moulin & Conway 2009; Ichikawa 2009; Windt 2010; Horton 2011). Dreaming involves a sharp bidirectional break in memory, such that our dream selves seem to be significantly disconnected: typically, we can neither reliably access our own autobiographical memories while dreaming nor clearly recollect our dreams on waking. This suggests that dreams and memory at least are firmly dissociated. But since our common sense categories for psychological processes need not map neatly on to the underlying mechanisms, there may also be overlaps and interactions across apparently distinct domains of cognition. In this paper, addressing some of the ways in which self and body are represented in dreams, we point to some specific and puzzling phenomena, which demand treatment using pooled theoretical resources from different cognitive domains as well as different disciplines. Consider these two dream reports, gathered in controlled studies amongst large numbers of recollected dreams: I was in a sort of South American country, two hundred years ago, I was mounting a horse: with me there were two more persons riding a horse, and other people on foot. We were pursuing a man, who was myself, we were pursuing him because he had some money, and I was observing the whole scene. (Cicogna & Bosinelli 2001, p.32) I was walking (apparently it was me) in a suburban area, past a house whose yard was about one and a half meters above the street level. In the yard a girl I know from medical school was leading a big bearlike dog. I was leading a dog that actually was my female classmate from medical school. The girl suddenly attacked the bear-dog and they fought. The person in the dream that so far had been me, now was suddenly my classmate J. Somehow I became (physically) detached from myself and I noticed that I was not me but him. This was accompanied by a funny feeling. (Revonsuo, 2005, pp.213–4) These reports fit a general picture of typical dreams as involving more or less bizarre narrative sequences. In the sciences of dreaming, the ‘bizarreness’ of dream reports is often analyzed into three distinct forms. The most common form of bizarreness is incongruity or mismatch of character, event, or setting, followed by vagueness or uncertainty, while full- scale discontinuity of narrative sequence is the least common (Stickgold & Hobson 1994; © 2013 The Authors Philosophy Compass 8/11 (2013): 1041–1053, 10.1111/phc3.12082 Philosophy Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Perspectives in Dreams 1043 Flanagan 2000, pp.147–8; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002): There is, however, ongoing disagree- ment on precisely how to measure bizarreness and on its prevalence in all of our dreams as opposed to those which are most memorable (Domhoff 2003; Sutton 2009, pp.531–2; Colace 2010; Rosen 2012, ch.2). But the bizarreness in these two reports has the notable extra feature that it stretches to touch the self, which is here variously shifting, doubled, observing, transformed, and de- tached. Such disruptions are not typical in most people’s dreams, for sure. In by far the majority of dream experiences, as Revonsuo puts it, ‘the self in the dream is the character who represents the dreamer’ and ‘is positioned in the center of the dream world’ such that ‘the dream setting and events are seen and experienced from his or her point of view’ (2005, p.207). Even if, as David Foulkes’ developmental studies suggest, it takes some time and some cognitive sophistication before the self regularly appears as an active character in extended dream narratives (Foulkes 1990, 1999), this does typically occur in the bulk of adult dreams. In another large-scale study, Strauch and Meier found that ‘the Dream Self appears in nearly every dream’, and for the most part (in 71% of dream reports) as a clear and active participant in each person’s own dream: but in addition to the 11% of cases in which the dreamer is present but inactive, there were also some 18% of dream reports in which the dreamer was either entirely uninvolved or explicitly absent (1996, pp.114–5). Despite meth- odological challenges in characterizing and coding different ways in which self-representa- tion in dreams might diverge from the standard case, various studies show that such divergence occurs in a sizeable minority of dreams. Our project here is to describe, probe, and assess the implications of two of its primary forms. Revonsuo notes the theoretical significance of the fact that the dream self ‘is not present in every single dream’, such that there is a simulated ‘world of subjective experiences devoid of an explicit representation of the self’ (2005, p.209). Here, we examine cases in which the self is displaced as well as miss- ing. Even within the study of self-representation in dreams, one can ask a range of other live questions, relating for example to our understandings of our own and others’ character and psychology in dreams, to the mechanisms of identification and misidentification in dreams and in delusions, and to the particular range of emotional experiences in dreaming (Foulkes et al.